Daesh attacks and the European fight against terrorism

Who speaks about the Third World War already started is either an ignorant or a fool. The two world wars were total wars, fought among states with gigantic armies and making millions of victims. DAESH is an armed Wahhabi/Salafi extremist militant group, based on a destructive cult, that took advantage of two failed states and Western proxy wars to take control of Mosul, Raqqa and a piece of territory between Syria and Iraq. It would be not difficult to defeat a small terrorist pseudo state that declared war to everyone apart them, first of all against their fellow Muslim brothers, as we can see from the bombs in Baghdad and Beirut. But the terrorism that they are using abroad will not stop. To limit terrorism we need securitization but to stop it there is only one way: integration.

After the new Paris attacks now we are waiting for a French Patriot Act on the style of the American one after 9-11 and French boots on the ground against DAESH. Europe and NATO too could intervene as France is part of NATO and could be considered under attack (according to Article 5 “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”). But as we know from the past (Iraqi war that contributed to create DAESH) a war, even if important, will not be enough, and could be also counterproductive, if not done with a long vision and proper tools of inclusive state reconstruction. This is what the EU and also the UN should start to think about now: how to help to reconstruct a new order in the Middle East. Yes we need a new order in the region after the end of the post-Ottoman one based on the Sykes-Picot agreements, but it has to be an autochthonous order, not an imperialist one. Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will have to compromise sooner or later with Iran, and they will have to help reconstruct the new states coming out of Syria and Iraq (probably four new states) like Europe helped ex Yugoslavia to build the new countries. The EU, US and Russia will have to support from outside, not put their hands inside again, as they did in the past. Otherwise the terrorist groups will start again, under new forms.

On the other front, to stop terrorism abroad, we need first of all to understand that we are facing a new type of war, asymmetric, hybrid and dynamic, and so we need new tools to face it, not armies and bombs but intelligence and police. Otherwise as the US failed to understand the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam we may fail to understand the terrorist war in our countries. Unfortunately this new tools could create permanent “state of emergencies” as already in France, so we will need to take care of not falling in the risk of Big Brother as the NSA did in the US. But is the temporary solution needed to control the terrorist cells. In the long run though to really stop terrorism, as we did with Nazism, we will need a new integration in Europe and the West in general, between the old inhabitants and the new immigrants. The foreign fighters born because of lack of integration and strong identity, not because of some innate hate towards the West, as racists everywhere say. Therefore a Patriot act and policy and intelligence measures will just limit but not solve the problem. Europeans are mourning now some innocent victims, like the US did 14 years ago, and like different parts of Middle East suffered for decades, because of European colonialism and Western imperialism. Yes we rich people of the West, we are responsible of the suffering of many populations, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly and often without completely knowing it (as the media didn’t show us the suffering we created with our wars and our economic exploitation). But today is the time to invert the trend: we need a new reconciliation between the ex-invaders and current hosts and the ex-invaded and current refugees. In Europe we need to build a new integration, this time social instead of economic, we need a new multiculturalism, based on respect of diversity. Europe until now thought too much about the money and too little about the souls. But the new wave of immigrants and refugees will help the continent to reflect that to live together we need rules but also awareness, to live together means to eat together but also talk together, and learn from each other. We need to teach tolerance and respect of different cultures, starting with the children and their program of education and following with ethical/solidarity/cultural tourism instead of those useless, ridiculous and offensive holiday resorts, counterproductive also for the local economies that remain dependent on foreign flows. If wars and neocolonialism are the parents of terrorism, racism and Islamophobia are its siblings: they don’t limit terrorism they fuel it. The path is long but is not eternal. As Giovanni Falcone once said of Mafia we can say today of terrorism: terrorism is a human phenomenon, and as all human phenomena has a start, an evolution and will have also an end.